Ubuntu / Linux news and application reviews.

Atom 1.9 was released recently, receiving major improvements, such as display layers, drag and drop layout management, and more.

Atom is a free, open source "hackable text editor for the 21st Century" developed by GitHub, available for Linux, Windows, and OS X. It features a built-in package manager that allows searching and installing new packages (and themes) from within Atom, smart autocompletion, file system browser, multiple panes, and more.

The application is built with HTML, JavaScript, CSS and Node.js integration, and it runs on Electron.

Changes in Atom 1.9:

drag and drop support for the layout;

the atom text-buffer library has received a new feature, called "display layers". You can find a complete explanation of this feature, HERE;

Electron was updated to v0.37.8 (Atom was previously using v0.36.12), which includes performance improvements and enables efficient ligatures rendering on all the platforms;

saving files should be more reliable, minimizing risk of losing files when a hard crash occurs;

shell commands compatibility on Windows, which makes the atom command compatible with both Cygwin and Msys;

GitRepositoryAsync API was removed because it was causing Atom's helper processes to become unstable, leading to hard crashes. A more stable async Git API will be reintroduced in the future;

Download Atom

Download Atom (binaries available for Linux: 64bit deb, rpm and generic, Windows and Mac, along with source code)

Ubuntu and Linux Mint users can install (and stay up to date with the latest versions) Atom for both 32bit and 64bit, by using the WebUpd8 Atom PPA. To add the PPA and install Atom, use the following commands: